William Joseph Simmons

William Joseph Simmons (6 May 1880-18 May 1945) was Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan from 1915 to 1922, succeeding Nathan Bedford Forrest and preceding Hiram Wesley Evans.

Biography
William Joseph Simmons was born in Harpersville, Alabama in 1880, and he served in the US Army during the Spanish-American War before working for Methodist churches. In 1915, inspired by the film Birth of a Nation, he and fourteen other white supremacists climbed Stone Mountain in Georgia and burned a cross, inaugurating the new Ku Klux Klan. He declared himself the Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and he took cross burnings and white robes from the film. The Klan portrayed itself as a fraternal organization, and it opposed Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and anyone else who was not a native-born Anglo-Saxon or Celtic Protestant. In 1922, Hiram Wesley Evans took over the Klan as Simmons distanced himself from the Klan's violent activities, and he died in Atlanta in 1945.